A Tunable Bandpass Filter with Arbitrarily Terminated Port Impedance Using Dual-Mode Resonator

This paper presents a design for a compact arbitrarily terminated port impedance tunable bandpass filter (BPF) with transmission zeros (TZs) that employs a dual-mode resonator. The proposed dual-mode resonator comprises two varactors along with series transmission lines and a shunt short-circuited stub. The resonant frequency separation of the dual-mode resonator can be adjusted by changing the length or characteristic impedance of the short-circuited stub. To achieve arbitrarily terminated port impedances, the coupling between the source/load and the dual-resonator is modified from the originally designed 50-to-50 Ω termination filter. Frequency selective characteristics are achieved by generating two TZs at the lower and upper frequencies of the passband. The location of the TZs can be changed by controlling the source-load coupling. To experimentally validate the proposed tunable BPF, three prototypes (50-to-50 Ω BPF, 25-to-50 Ω BPF, and 20 + j10-to-50 Ω BPFs) are designed and fabricated. The measurement results revealed that the center frequency can be tuned from 2.10 GHz to 3.02 GHz (920 MHz tunability), where the insertion loss varies from 1.50 to 2.5 dB.